Archive-name: motss/qrd-faq Last-modified: 31 Jan 1994 Unlike most FAQs, this list is not a collection of hearsay. (A "+" indicates a new question, and a "*" indicates a change from the last edition of this FAQ. When you see a question number in this list, you can probably use your newsreader to search the rest of this article for that question number.) 1. What is the QRD? 2. How long has the QRD been around? 3. Who operates and maintains the QRD? 4. (*) How do I access it? 5. How do I find something in it? 6. (*) How frequently do people use it? 7. What is a mirror, and why do I care? 8. Sounds cool; how can I mirror the QRD? 9. How often are the files updated, and what about accuracy? 10. How do I add something to it? 11. What file formats are allowed? 1. What is the QRD? The QRD (short for Queer Resources Directory) is an electronic library with news clippings, political contact information, newsletters, essays, images, and every other kind of information resource of interest to the GLBO community. Information is stored both for the use of casual network users and serious researchers alike. There is one exception to the broad collection guidelines. Although the QRD recognizes the imporance of erotic artwork and writing to our community, we do not archive that type of information. Please look elsewhere for those resources. 2. How long has the QRD been around? The QRD started in 1991 as an electronic archive for Queer Nation. It has been hosted -- although not officially supported -- at both cambridge.apple.com, and nifty.andrew.cmu.edu. In 1993 the QRD moved to vector.intercon.com, a privately owned and maintained system. On January 1, 1994, vector's name changed to vector.casti.com, although the QRD did not have to move again. 3. Who operates and maintains the QRD? In the early days, the QRD could be maintained by a single individual: Ron Buckmire, a graduate student at RPI. He will graduate in June '94 with a Ph.D. in Mathematics. Ron is still involved as the chief manager of the QRD, but the explosive growth the QRD experienced in 1993 demanded a larger staff. On April 9, 1993, the QRD headquarters moved from nifty.andrew.cmu.edu to vector.casti.com due to some other (non-QRD related) problems which had developed on nifty. At that time, David Casti became the QRD system administrator tasked with improving the access methods available for the QRD and also providing general technical support. David is currently employed as a technical support engineer for InterCon Systems Corporation. While Ron is in the "home stretch" of finishing his degree and has little time to spend attending to the QRD, David has also assumed the role of Acting Manager. September 1, 1993 was Thomas Holt Jr's first day as associate manager for the QRD. As Ron's school-related responsibilities had increased, a new position was created and Tom was recruited mostly to handle the maintenance of the QRD -- adding new files, monthly highlights files, etc. Tom is a staff member at Indiana State University. As technology marched on, the QRD staff discussed the opportunities hypertext provided for "information surfing", but no one had the time to put together hypertext documents. On October 5, Darci Chapman from Nehalem River Software volunteered to create several hypertext files for the QRD users, and on November 1, 1993 this new access method was opened for business. On December 7, 1993, the QRD added its first liaison officer: Kevyn Jacobs, the Electronic Organizer for Equality Kansas. Kevyn's responsibility is to act as a liaison to AOL and assist AOL users who want access to QRD resources. January 3, 1994, saw the addition of Alan Hamilton to our staff as the Bisexual Resource Center Administrator. Alan is responsible for maintaining and updating files of interest to our many bisexual users. The QRD staff can be reached at qrdstaff@vector.casti.com. 4. How do I access it? The QRD can be accessed via electronic mail, BBS, FTP, WAIS, gopher, and WWW (lynx and Mosaic). Details for each access method -- EMAIL: The Queer Resources Directory can now be accessed via email from any Internet-reaching system. This means you can extract files from the QRD even if you only have a CompuServe, AOL, FidoNet, or mail-only Internet BBS connection. To use this service, send electronic mail to ftpmail@vector.casti.com The subject line of your message will be ignored. Your message must begin with "open" on a line by itself and end with "quit" on a line by itself. Between those two delimiters, you may use the following commands: ls [pathname] short listing of pathname. Default pathname is current directory. dir [pathname] long listing of pathname. Default pathname is current directory. cd pathname Change directory. get pathname Get a file and email it back. You are strongly encouraged to use the following message on your first use of this service: open dir get ABOUT.VECTOR cd pub/QRD dir get 00README quit This script will cause the ftpmail program to send you 6 messages in response: 1. An acknowledgement that your request was received and is queued 2. A top-level directory of vector.casti.com's FTP area 3. A short file about Vector 4. A directory of the QRD 5. The QRD Readme file 6. A receipt that your request was successfully processed A few notes about this service: * Since any file you request will be emailed back to you, there is no need for concern about filename length. * Any file that ends in .Z is a binary file. It will be delivered to you as a uuencoded file. To make use of this file, you will have to uudecode it and then uncompress it. * If your mailer only supports small messages, you can use the command size #K where # is the largest size (in K) that your mailer supports. Files larger than this limit will be fragmented into as many pieces as necessary before they are transferred. For example, America Online has a maximum message size of 250K, so any AOL users would need to include the line size 250K if they were attempting to transfer large files via email. For more information about this service, send a message containing only "help" on a line by itself. BBS: Because we realize there are many people who would use the QRD but don't have Internet access, there are computer BBS services which have agreed to mirror our archive for their users. They are: Central Park BBS +44 81 947 4411 Outright +1 510 568 9461 Administered by: Chuck Litzell The Underground BBS +1 908 262 9666 FTP: To access the QRD by FTP you must issue these commands: ftp vector.casti.com OR ftp 149.52.1.130 Log in as "anonymous" and at the password prompt, enter your email address -- make sure it has an @ sign, or you will be denied access. Then enter: cd /pub/QRD Then before you start, you should look at the README file. The HIGHLIGHTS file is also useful to get a sense of what files are popular. To get these files, issue the commands: get 00README get 0HIGHLIGHTS If your system needs to have filenames of another type you can change the name that the file you are getting will have on your local system by simply giving it. So you would say: get 0QRD-BY-GOPHER qrdgopher.txt and then the file would appear on your local system as 'qrdgopher.txt' and not 0QRD-BY-GOPHER. You can look at these files by either leaving FTP by issuing "bye" or "quit" or "exit". Or, from a UNIX box, you could suspend FTP by sending a "^Z" [control-Z] then looking at the files README and HIGHLIGHTS on your system and then re-starting FTP by issuing a "fg" command. Then you can "cd" to whereever you want and get the desired file from that directory. Look at the GUIDE file to see the full directory structure of the QRD. If you would like to ADD materials to the QRD please leave them in the /pub/QRD/incoming directory. You can also submit materials by email at QRD@vector.casti.com. The QRD is currently mirrored on five other Internet hosts: nifty.andrew.cmu.edu (128.2.35.7) /pub/QRD qrd.tcp.com (128.95.10.106) /pub/QRD northstar.otago.ac.nz (139.80.64.10) /pub/QRD ftp.uu.net (192.48.96.9) /doc/political/umich-poli/QRD red.css.itd.umich.edu (192.131.22.7) /pub/Politics/QRD You may find that one of these other hosts is faster for connections from your local machine. In the case of our Australia and New Zealand users, the speed difference should be substantial. WAIS: If you don't feel like wading through the 3000+ files in the QRD by gopher, email, and FTP, a searchable full-text database is available for use instead. The database is automatically reindexed, starting at 02:30 eastern time, every morning. For the novice user, the easiest way to access the WAIS database is via a gopher connection to vector.casti.com. For information about how to do that, see the 0QRD-BY-GOPHER file. For those users who have WAIS tools already and are familiar with their use, the qrd.src file reads: (:source :version 3 :ip-name "vector.casti.com" :tcp-port 210 :database-name "/wais/qrd" :cost 0.00 :cost-unit :free :maintainer "qrdstaff@vector.casti.com" ) GOPHER: If your site has a Gopher client on its system then you can just type gopher vector.casti.com and you will be directly connected to the machine that the Queer Resources Directory is on. Then just select "Queer Resources" and you will be in. If your system doesn't have a gopher client, but you know you're on the net, you can access the public gopher client on vector. To access: 1. telnet vector.casti.com 2. login: gopher No password is required, and you'll be connected immediately to the top level of vector's gopher server. Select "Queer Resources" and you're on your way to the QRD! This resource is scarce, so please avoid using it if you have gopher access from another site. If you're a gopher administrator, and you want to link to the QRD archive itself, use: Type=1 Name=Queer Resource Directory Path=1/gaystuff/QRD Host=vector.casti.com Port=70 And to link to the WAIS search engine, use: Type=7 Name=Search the Queer Resource Directory via WAIS Path=waissrc:/gaystuff/qrd.src Host=vector.casti.com Port=70 WWW: The QRD has recently added hypertext to the many access methods already supported. The Universal Record Locator for our home page is: ftp://vector.casti.com/pub/QRD/.html/QRD-home-page.html Simply point your WWW client (ie, lynx, Mosaic, or www) at that URL and you'll be connected to us immediately. Our New Zealand FTP mirror has recently added hypertext access to his server as well. The Universal Record Locator for that server is: http://northstar.otago.ac.nz/QRD/.html/QRD-home-page.html The two most common character/curses based WWW clients are 'www' (big surprise) and 'lynx'. GUI based clients include tkWWW and Mosaic for the X Window System, MS Windows, and Mac. If you don't have a local WWW or Mosaic client but you do have access to telnet, don't despair. There are public 'www' accounts that you can telnet to and access ascii based browers. Please note that while we have done out best to document the steps to be taken in order to load the QRD Home Page from these public sites, the information below could be out of date before we know it. You can help us out by sending us updates as you discover them. Send email to QRDstaff@vector.intercon.com with corrections and/or pointers. The sites are: telnet www.njit.edu or telnet 128.235.163.2 (USA [NJ]) telnet ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu or 129.237.1.30 (USA [KS]) telnet www.lbl.gov or telnet 128.3.254.133 (USA [CA]) telnet millbrook.lib.rmit.edu.au (Login: lynx) (AUSSIE) telnet info.cern.ch or telnet 128.141.201.74 (SWISS) telnet vms.huji.ac.il or telnet 128.139.4.3 (ISRAEL) See below for more details on how to get to the QRD Home Page from the US sites. ========== The following requires a little work since most sites do not allow anonymous users to jump right a particular page. The overall approach is to 'get beyond' the local services/databases and access a global list or searching function and then find the Queer Resources Directory listed explicity. ========== University of Kansas: telnet ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu or telnet 129.237.1.30 Login: www (no password, start up takes a little while) You will start up at the University of Kansas Home Page; follow these steps: 1) Under "Information Sources About and For WWW", select "WWW Information By Subject" by using your arrow keys (or the tab key) and then hit return. 2) On this page, enter a "/" (no quotes) to search for a string; at the search prompt, enter "Queer" (no quotes) 3) Queer Resources Directory should now show up and can be selected. Press return and you will be at the QRD Home Page! ========== New Jersey Institute of Technology telnet www.njit.edu or telnet 128.235.163.2 Login: www (no password) Select: 19 (Other Info Systems) 3 (By Service Type) 3 (Master List of WEB Sites) 25 (Other Subjects) 89 (Politics and Economics/QRD) If the numbers are out of sync, go by the text provided above. You may have to use 'N' to scroll down the page to view the appropriate choices. ========== 5. How do I find something in it? Hmmm... This is a tough one, but a question we get quite a bit at the QRD. Unfortunately, our staff is not large enough to provide research assistance, but here are some tips: * Read the HIGHLIGHTS file. This is file contains a quick synopsys of new and updated information that is of interest to most of our users. * Use WAIS. Since we've gone to the trouble to create a WAISindex for the database, use it! You can be sure that WAIS is up-to-date, as the entire QRD index is scrapped and rebuilt every morning at about 2 a.m. This technique is by far the most powerful tool when you are looking for specific information in the QRD. * Use Gopher and Mosaic. Where possible, the QRD staff has created very descriptive handles to files in both gopher and Mosaic. These methods may provide more information than just the filename, and it will be much easier to surf the archive, reading only the first screen or two of a potentially interesting file before moving on. WAIS database searches are available via both gopher and Mosaic. 6. (*) How frequently people use it? As 1993 has seen the QRD more than double in size, it only makes sense that the number of accesses has also increased dramatically. The QRD on vector reported 70,000 hits in December 1993, and more than 100,000 in January. There are eight mirror sites for the QRD and while statistics are not available from them, any reasonable estimate makes the QRD one of the most frequently accessed libraries of its kind. Mirror sites are listed in each of the QRD-BY files, referenced in question 4. 7. What is a mirror, and why do I care? A mirror is a site which keeps an up-to-date copy of another site's files and makes those files available. In many ways, it functions as a backup which is updated daily or weekly -- usually automatically, but sometimes manually. For most Internet users, there is little need or reason to use the QRD's mirrors regularly. Vector is on a highly stable segment of the network with ample bandwidth for many, many simultaneous network connections. However, there are two cases when using a mirror makes sense: 1. When vector.casti.com goes down. Over the last 12 months, vector has had full network access 95% of the time. Of course, we all know that the QRD will only be out-of-reach during that 5% of the time you really need it -- knowing a mirror site will prevent you from losing that 5%. 2. If you are on a network segment with restricted access or no access to the rest of the commercial US Internet. A prime example is many of our QRD users in New Zealand who do not have access outside their own country. Fortunately, there is now a mirror in that country which now serves the needs of New Zealand, Austrialia and asia. 8. Sounds cool; how can I mirror the QRD? If you have more than 35 megs of free disk space and want to run either a public or private mirror of the QRD, there are a couple good options. Using perl, the program "mirror" will check the QRD for changes and only download the files you need to keep your site up to date. It can be found on various FTP sites and a version is available from vector in the directory /pub/unix/mirror* If you can't do that for whatever reason, you can still download a tarred copy of the QRD to your local site via FTP. Be warned: FTP on vector does not currently support automatically compressing tarfiles on their way out, so you'll be downloading a VERY LARGE file. If you want to give that a try: 1. Connect to vector 2. cd /pub 3. get QRD.tar 9. How often are the files updated, and what about accuracy? With the exception of a few files which are also maintained by the QRD staff (most notably the soc.motss FAQ and the LGBO list of email lists), we can make no warranty for the timeliness or accuracy of the information in the QRD. Since we draw on the net.public at large for most of our files, there is no way we could possibly verify each piece of information in our archives. Wherever possible, though, we include the name and email address of the person who submitted the file and you can of course contact that person for more information. If you find a file in the QRD which has out-of-date information, please bring it to our attention. As a general rule we will not remove files from the QRD without ample reason, but in the case of obsolete data we will do our best to keep that kind of misinformation to a minimum. 10. How do I add something to it? If you think you have something that would be of value to other GLBO folk as resource material -- for example an essay you've written or a set of fliers you've developed for a media campaign -- by all means, send the files our way. There are two convenient methods: 1. Send email to QRD@vector.casti.com with your submission. 2. Via FTP, upload your file(s) to /pub/QRD/incoming. 11. What file formats are accepted? Most of the information in the QRD is ASCII text, and this is definitely our preferred format. ASCII can be easily indexed and reindexed, moved from platform to platform, compressed, formatted, etc. The only notable exception to this rule is the presence of a few GIF files. If you have questions or a special need for your submission, by all means drop us a line and we'll work something out. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------